(12) Wed Aug 25 2004 13:30 PSTAlso, You Can Only Use A Barometer:
Since the last entry got so many comments, I would like to make this entry another in the same vein, because I like comments. How many ways can we come up with to distinguish hard-boiled eggs from regular eggs? No cost is too high, no preparation too elaborate. My contributions:

The one from the previous entry, where you buy brown eggs especially for boiling and white eggs for leaving alone and not boiling.

There's some way of distinguishing good eggs from bad eggs by holding it up to a candle or other bright light and looking at the size of the yolk or something. You should also be able to use this to distinguish boiled and raw eggs.

Just crack the egg and, if it turns out to have been raw, go back in time and stop yourself from cracking it.

I feel like the third one would be a good Tom the Dancing Bug strip. There would be that moment when you were poised to break the egg, wondering if your future self would show up to stop yourself from breaking the egg. Of course, your future self can only show up when you have already broken the egg and found it was not boiled. Are YOU your future self, or are you your PAST self, who your true self (which is in the future) will save? Or is the egg boiled?

Another good way to do confirm that an egg is boiled is to put the eggs in a pan, covered by about 1" of water. Bring the water to a boil, then wait ten minutes. Remove the eggs from the stove and run cold water over them. Then you are sure the egg is boiled.

Maybe you could put food coloring in the water when you boil your eggs. That idea is useful AND fun.

There may be a way to split a chicken such that the collision creates an egg pair, each with an unknown cooked/raw state, traveling in opposite directions. Then by cracking one of them in a moving pan, you collapse the wave function of the other without even observing it.

For reference, the links to "how to boil an egg" and "how to tell if an egg has completely cooked" appeared in clickolinko because we were convincing a very drunk Carlos Laviola of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to drink water and eat an egg so as to ward off the morning regrets.

Essentially, I think a good razor is to investigate whether the egg was boiled by someone who was drunk or sober.

I use (or rather would use, if the situation ever came up, which it doesn't) the Alton Brown method to detect boiled or raw egg. You take the egg and spin it, then you stop the egg's spinning, making sure to touch the egg for as little time as possible while doing so. If the egg returns to spinning it is raw, and if not it is cooked.

And, according to the rules of Crummy, I win, since I managed to give an answer that involves both inertia and Alton Brown.

This is easy. Others are making it hard.
It takes a second and a table top to tell if an egg is hard-boiled.
Set it on the table, give it a jerk in either direction with your wrist,
the raw egg will resist, the hard egg will happily spin fast.

ok, your best bet is, as someone already said, spinning and stopping. raw eggs spin again. but the reason you would do this is a simple one- every easter after the egg hunt, all the cousins and aunts and uncles get together for a special sort of ritual- the egg fight. not as violent as you'd hope, it's still fun- two people hold an egg each and bash the pointier part of the egg against their opponent's. the loser eats the egg, the winner goes on to another match. eventually, an overall winner emerges and is celebrated, but just as celebrated is the sap who found the one egg that was decorated but not cooked, pratically identical to the others. knowing you have this egg is a bit of a bummer, but it allows you to select who you want to get raw egg on (usually you want to single out aunt maggie) and ask them for a match first. true story.